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What Makes You Agile?

I cringe whenever I hear an executive or a manager say something like, "Yeah, we got some development teams doing that agile thing." Which is usually followed by something like, "I don’t know what the impact is, but we have a directive to have more teams doing agile."

There are so many problems with those two statements my head usually starts spinning…

"What exactly do you mean, you are doing agile?"

"Why are only the developers participating?"

"What metrics are you using to verify improvement?"

"Who made the directive and how are they helping the organization succeed?"

The most important thing you need to accept for an agile transformation to be successful is this – agile is not something you do, it is something you are. Let me repeat that. Agile is not something you do, it is something you are. Actually, in many cases, agile ends up being something you are not. But let’s stay positive.